Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
History
Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland
and to worry England herself. It was all very well to urge that the
tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to
extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule
had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would contain
different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr.
Parnell's nominees. Neither of these arguments could overcome the
suspicious antipathy which many Englishmen felt, nor dissolve the
association in their minds between the Nationalist leaders and the
forces of disorder. The Parnellites (thus they reasoned) are bad men;
what they seek is therefore likely to be bad, and whether bad in itself
or not, they will make a bad use of it. In such reasonings there was
more of sentiment and prejudice than of reason, but sentiment and
prejudice are proverbially harder than arguments to expel from minds
where they have made a lodgment.
The internal condition of Ireland supplied more substantial grounds for
alarm. As everybody knows, she is not, either in religion or in blood,
or in feelings and ideas, a homogeneous country. Three-fourths of the
people are Roman Catholics, one-fourth Protestants, and this Protestant
fourth subdivided into bodies not fond of one another, who have little
community of sentiment. Besides the Scottish colony in Ulster, many
English families have settled here and there through the country. They
have been regarded as intruders by the aboriginal Celtic population, and
many of them, although hundreds of years may have passed since they
came, still look on themselves as rather English than Irish. The last
fifty years, whose wonderful changes have in most parts of the world
tended to unite and weld into one compact body the inhabitants of each
part of the earth's surface, connecting them by the ties of commerce,
and of a far easier and swifter intercourse than was formerly possible,
have in Ireland worked in the opposite direction. It has become more and
more the habit of the richer class in Ireland to go to England for its
enjoyment, and to feel itself socially rather English than Irish. Thus
the chasm between the immigrants and the aborigines has grown deeper.
The upper class has not that Irish patriotism which it showed in the
days of the National Irish Parliament (1782-1800), and while there is
thus less of a common national feeling to draw rich and poor together,
the strife of landlords and tenants has continued, irritating the minds
of both parties, and gathering them into two hostile camps. As everybody
knows, the Nationalist agitation has been intimately associated with the
Land agitation--has, in fact, found a strong motive-force in the desire
of the tenants to have their rents reduced, and themselves secured
against eviction. Now, many people in England assumed that an Irish
Parliament would be under the control of the tenants and the humbler
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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